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SAYING ANYTHING
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Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but
not necessarily in that order, and the best ones start in
medias res. In an age when popularity is everything, to
be unfollowed is against the current. To say a true and
beautiful thing and someone hit that unfollow button is
the most counter-culture you can be right now. The
unfollow button is now the counter-culture symbol.
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UNFOLLOWED
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On September 11th 2001, the Twin Towers in New York
City were hit by two hijacked airplanes. Nearly 3,000
people died. No sound of music. People around the
world watched the planes explode in to the buildings on
colour television sets in horror and silence. The once
tone of individual power over circumstances, a rockstar
attitude to life, was shattered. The world was a living
reality, itself as chaotic as the pop culture.
Similar to the 80s the rich are getting richer and the
poor are losing homes, unemployment rate rose higher,
public money spent on war instead of the public,
pensions not getting paid and the population age rising,
a time when we feel that technology changes the world
more than politics, resigned in to the current of
technological progress, a people who are jumping
through hoops to join the next big thing, who are
trainspotting life away because they can't keep up with
it, afraid of the future with no interest in the past, no
grasp of the world with no feeling of identity within it,
and loss of meaning in life. Voices that get lost and
forgotten on the stream
Everybody felt lost, and like the 1960s, was making it up
as they go along, protesting the same rights movements,
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to crack the tarmac street and disrupt the old
conformist views, to break the twitter stream and break
the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s the voiceless had a
centralised voice to express their anxieties. Now in an
era of user generated content and social media we can
all have a voice and we see that these deep and burning
anxieties are general anxieties that we all go through.
The task however is overcoming them not simply
expressing them. And that's the rarer and less relatable
thing, but nevertheless, the right and better thing.
Kids used to be kids and live for the day and not worry
about tomorrow and now they're asking what's going to
happen to the world. Kids are being told what theyre
future is like, and theyre scared of their uncertain
futures, and so they listen. The world is changing so
rapidly that people are making absurd hypothesis about
the future because they have as much absurd
understanding of the past. Theres no truth in forecasts
of the future if theres no grasp on the present. If
history shows anything is that technological, political,
social phenomena always throws predictions out of the
window. I want to tell kids not to be afraid of their
future. Kids feel overwhelmed and powerless to their
future so they fall in to place believing that it gives them
stability and control. Young people have indescribable
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pressure. Young people are scared of the future and
feel so powerless to the current of change in the world,
and yet all the demand from the world is more change,
as though the world were on rotation and they're just
calling out next!
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find new music artists. Reality TV stars showing you can
make a career out of just being a person.
1960s surf rock come back with bands like Beach House
and Best Coast fused with Velvet Underground and My
Bloody Valentine drones. Lana Del Rey as a kind orange
peel of the whole thing, an aesthetic homage to the
Golden Age, taking a slice from everywhere. Very
significant issues like Black Lives Matter, Feminism,
sexuality equality, and other issues which resemble the
1960s that felt to have underscored the era than
defined it.
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Anhoni, Robert Wilson and other artists making
incredible work in my city.
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There is another precursor outside of the music, politics,
and recovery after the economic depression: the art
and literary world. Popculture makes countless
references to Tracey Emin in the 2000s, Daimien Hirst
in the 1990s, Jean-Michael Basquit in the 1980s, Andy
Wharhol in the 1970s, the investment that the
American CIA put in to art is significant. Expressionism
was also a means the United States saw to show to the
world it's ideals of freedom, that even art could be this
free. The American government saw it was another way
to show Soviet territory that America was a kind of
paradise, and the way forward, beyond and away from
rigidity of their Constructionalism.
There are those bad artists that enjoy pain and those
bad audiences, and those good artists that overcome it.
We want to depict ourselves as art to see ourselves. We
can see ourselves better often in art than in rational
explanation. Look at the Roman sculpture of Laocon
and his sons being eaten alive by giant snakes. The story
was the subject of a lost tragic play by Sophocles.
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If there's anything exemplified in the Laocon sculpture
its strength within that ordeal. And the Romans would
have known the story and known he doesnt make it
out alive. So its not an image of victory but tragedy. But
what you see is strength in a beautiful artwork.
Although its follows none of the Archaic Greek
sculptural principles during the tragic period, what is
more Roman than strength in ordeal. It does this by a
fictional image crafted with the precision of reality,
cloaking reality with myth - which is not at all unlike the
surrealists. Much of what we think of Classical art is that
its about rationality which is a misunderstanding. Most
of the work are unreal images, taken from myth,
envisioned with the same precision of reality. Were
told that classical art is about rationalism, but in a way
its just as irrational as surrealism whenever its myth. It
might even be perfect surrealism. Tragic art is ugly
beautiful. It's recognising the terrible truths of the
nature of life and the terrible crisis, but painting it with
beauty so we can endure it. That was the same genius
of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer.
There's no happy ending in these masques of tragedy.
Yet we come away from Shakespeare not filled with
gloom but full of exhilaration. Theres more similiarity
between our pop culture and ancient and Renaissance
art than in Neoclassicalism and modernism, which was
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far too rational and sober to create surrealism or tragic
myth. There's no rosey-eyed glasses of romanticism,
the truth is ugly, nevertheless, life is beautiful. Didnt
Alexander McQueen say the same thing that he was
attracted to the grotesque and wanted to show that
something could be messy but also elegant. And how
many of the fashion shows with Simon and Joseph
Bennett were envisioned out of a dream vision. In fact it
was beautifully expressed by the name given to his
exhibition Savage Beauty.
Conceptual art is that one cant see life with any clarity
so the artist sees it through impressions, distortions,
and concepts. Lies because he does not know how to
see the truth.
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cant be divided so neat and tidy as the decades of the
Gregorian calender. Life isnt so convenient as that.
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Nick Knight once said in an interview from a McQueen
shoot with antlers protruding from the models
shoulders, that when people criticised it he said "why
can people accept images in horror movies but have a
problem with it in photography. Film is twenty-four
frames per second, this is just one frame." In a horror
film people find it agreeable to find terrifying images
terrifying, but Nick Knight's images are beautiful. And
those people found it disagreeable to their own
conscience to find antler's protruding out of someone's
shoulders beautiful. Nick Knights work makes everyone
who feels, looks, are, and may be judged differently feel
OK and feel beautiful. We all feel our own pain and lifes
beauty at the same time.
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two, where they married briefly in the 70s and 90s.
Which is perhaps why surrealism is again so relevant.
The 80s was so visual that the 90s was kind of a return
to what people felt like, but what they felt like within
the 80s visual world. The 90s had so many satirical
comedies. We knew ourselves again. We began to
understand the world and talk about how it felt to be in
that world, to ask big questions again, and dealt with
those issues on television. If filmmakers like Alejandro
Jaradowski and the opening of Fellini's 8 1/2 as more
art house cinema, then in popular cinema Stanley
Kubrick was the most symbolist and surrealist
filmmaker during the century. "The most important
parts of a film are the mysterious parts - beyond the
reach of reason and language" Stanley Kubrick. Like
every great piece of visual cinema it mixed symbolism
and surrealism with an existential concern. Even1990s
television in The X-Files, what made it so relatable was
the slogan The Truth Is Out There. To search for the
truth in a world that was so far removed from truth. We
could all relate to that. Every copy of that show that
was just about aliens and the supernatural no one could
connect with.
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Isamaya Ffrench, Nick knight, Harley Weir, FKAtwigs,
SHOWstudio in general (not to mention, though I mean
them, Rei Nadal, Marie Schuller, Ruth Hogben, Pavel
Brenner, Vincent Haycock, Tabitha Denholm to name
only a very few), and fashion designers too numerous to
mention - not that it defines the time, but theres
options to see a energy of a culture that there wasnt
before. A culture that seems more surreal that is also
more intelligent. And a new visual culture through
instagram has opened up a new surrealism, a satirical
and cynical take on ourselves and on censorship itself.
Not out of expressing and appeasing an anxiety but out
of an intellectual understanding of the world around us
and our own behaviour within it. Out of the decades of
political, social, and economic reality, it became almost
too much to bare with. Now were turning more to
satire and surrealism to be able to handle facing reality.
Out of a necessity to handle the truth with high spirits.
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The Golden Age of popular culture is over. Now popular
culture is no longer culture, its just popular. Whilst
Kinfolk-culture would appear as a reinstatement of that
1950s traditional values, the rockstar mentality and the
surrealist aesthetic lives on from the Golden Age of
popular culture. The electricity in culture now is who is
being unfollowed. And whoever walks unfollowed,
walks their own path. Maybe the better way to describe
the next phase will be unpopular culture. So unfollow
me, unsubscribe, and unlike me.
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